Pulling on the hidden one - erupting the tooth

Remember the extraction of my baby tooth?

The gap on the top is the one from where the baby tooth was extracted.
There is a permanent tooth sitting inside that tooth hole which needs to be pulled down..

Now it's time, to put in the instruments which are going to pull that shy fellow down. So, after my dentist performed some clearing out of the gum around the area, she had then put on a bracket on the TINY bit of the permanent tooth that was slightly visible inside - it was quite difficult for her to get to that.

After that, a kind of a rubbery-band was placed on the permanent tooth. A bracket could not be placed on this tooth yet like the ones on the other teeth because only a VERY SMALL portion of this tooth was visible right now and the typical brackets usually require space. So a temporary rubbery-like something was attached on this tooth and it was tied by archwire to the brackets on the teeth on its sides. This would produce a tension from the brackets on the sides of the tooth and that would, eventually, pull the permanent tooth down over time.

So after the pull-down setup was done, this is how it looked.

Am not sure if you can see the permanent tooth there, but it's right there - being pulled down by the archwire.
This is gonna be a long process.

Disclaimer: If anyone is disgusted by these pictures, please press Ctrl+W (or Command+W on Mac)

The process of tooth development in which the teeth enter the mouth and become visible is called tooth eruption - wikipedia. Typically the tooth eruption of both the baby teeth and the permanent teeth has a natural schedule. But in my case, with the baby tooth having stayed for longer than normal, the eruption of the permanent tooth is now being done with artificial means.

Upper jaw wired up

So after I got my overly staying baby tooth removed from my upper jaw and then after getting the brackets for the upper jaw, it was time to wire up the teeth of the upper jaw.

After wiring up the upper braces 

After wiring up the upper braces

Before wiring up the upper braces

Disclaimer: If anyone is disgusted by these pictures, please press Ctrl+W (or Command+W on Mac)

Thus, i said good bye to safari

The only reason I had been using Safari along side Google Chrome was to have my work tabs signed into safari and my personal tabs signed into chrome - chrome has some GREAT extensions to make social networking and other stuff fun. 


But with multiple sign on now available in google chrome, I have now said good bye to safari. The feature has been out there in Chrome for quite a long time though. But I have finally made my move a few weeks ago. And it feels GREAT to be using both my personal tabs and my work tabs with the power of awesome Google Chrome extensions synced across ALL MY DEVICES.


[p.s. I know, I have caught the train pretty late.]

Got my bite plate for the lower jaw

So, with the teeth of my lower jaw wired up, sometimes there is a chance that the pressure of the wire trying to correct the alignment would push the teeth backwards and form a bad alignment. What needs to be done is to also put pressure from the back side so that the the teeth are held in the desired alignment instead of forming a bad alignment.

A bite plate is a small, removable acrylic appliance that fits on the roof of the mouth behind the front teeth. It should feel secure and fit snugly - source

source: uniortholab.com

Bite plate behind the teeth on my lower jaw.
Notice the whitish transparent plates at the bottom and its clamps holding on to the molars beside the gaps.

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The clamps were needed to hold the molars in place so that the tension of the wire between the molars and the front teeth did not pull the molars forward, but instead pulled the front teeth along backward. Hence, the clamps would hold the molars in place to achieve just that InshAllah.

Got brackets on upper jaw - unwired

So, two days ago, I got my third (and hopefully the last) extraction done from my upper jaw. Now it was time to put my braces on the upper jaw. First up, only the brackets were placed on the upper jaw. They use a bonding glue to put up these brackets on the front line of teeth.

after putting upper brackets.
The lower line looks different because the arch wires on the lower jaw were replaced in the middle.

before putting upper brackets - old picture

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The arch wires would be pulled across the upper line on a later visit. For now, i needed to give a measurement of my lower jaw for bite plates to be made of my size.

Third one down - extractions complete - with a EUREKA

In the same sitting with my dentist when the wires were replaced, right after that I had my third extraction done from my upper jaw - Alhamdulillah.

This one was the overly stayed baby tooth who should have left a lot earlier by this age. However, praise be to Allah that this was successfully diagnosed and the extraction finally took place.

The one without the root is the baby tooth.

My dentist's assistants were pretty excited to see a deciduous tooth (a baby tooth) coming out of an over 20 years old guy's mouth. They were not aware about my case as much as my dentist was.

After the extraction, while I was still on anesthesia, my dentist did some preparations on the gum for the permanent tooth to be pulled down later. Mostly it meant, cutting and clearing out the gum around that tooth to make space - I guess some kind of an excavation sort of thing. I am not entirely sure what exactly was being done there. But this extraction position looked bigger than the previous extraction positions after the extra bits were done by my dentist.

And while she was doing those extra bits to make space, she went like "PAISI!" ('Got It!' in Bangla) when she saw the permanent tooth that was sitting deep inside.

So how would my pretty mouth be without three of those white fellas in place?

The gap on the top is the one from where the baby tooth was extracted.
There is a permanent tooth sitting  inside that tooth hole which needs to be pulled down.
The other extracted position is on the other side.

Disclaimer: If anyone is disgusted by these pictures, please press Ctrl+W (or Command+W on Mac)

To quicken up the healing process, like the previous times, I was suggested to:

• eat soft food for the first few days to go easy on the wound 
• eat cold ice cream to heal the wound quickly 
• rinse my mouth with lukewarm salt water regularly from the following day to prevent any infection from developing around the wound

Wanna read about my first and second extractions?

Wires replaced - this time tighter.

So, after i trimmed down the buggy wires the previous night, today i went to my dentist and explained to her what happened. After that, she took off all the wires that were currently tied around my lower jaw and installed new set of wires - this time, they were FURTHER tightened than before.

During this visit, my dentist said that the congestion had noticeably reduced on my lower jaw since the time i put on the braces.

The first time these wires were placed, they were not as tight as they were tied this time. But they felt much more harder during the first time - perhaps because of the first time effect. This time, even though the wires were further tightened than before, they didn't feel much painful.

UPDATE: Changing the wires is a typical process over a monthly basis - not subjective to the issue i described in a previous post about the buggy wires slipping out. Got to learn this from an article on archwired.com which tried to explain the procedure of changing the arch wire on a monthly basis.


The article says:

Every 4 to 6 weeks, you go to your orthodontist to get your braces "tightened" or "adjusted." Sounds awful, doesn't it? Nothing is really "tightened." It's really very simple.

Trimmed down the buggy wires - slipped off at night

Even after applying the beeswax for some time (about one week to be precise) to get my skin adapted to the metallic wires, there were SOME wire ends that were a bit TOO long and a bit TOO sharp. The adaptation of the skin by the beeswax for a week was not enough to put these long ones at ease.

So this time I went to my dentist and asked her to do something about these prickly ones. She had cut some of those tied ends to make the length of the wire knots smaller so that they are lesser aggressive to the skin.

HOWEVER, when you tie a shoe lace with JUST ENOUGH length of the lace to tie off the knots and not much extra length left, the LITTLE left of part can sometimes slip through and make the whole knot un-knotified (or is that the right word?). So that's what happened while having dinner with guests at home that very night.

Suddenly i felt a TTTTTRRRRRRIIINNNNGGGGGG in my mouth and that was BAD. The strong wire on that part of the tooth suddenly got untied and straightened out and was poking directly into my mouth. Quickly my dad handed me a pair of cutting pliers from his toolbox, and I cut out the erected wire as much as possible from its base on the bracket.

I was scared.

Got my own domain name

So, today my new (and first) domain name has finally been put in place - www.syedrakib.com


I was mainly intrigued by BRAC Bank E-Commerce portal where I saw that it's now possible to make online payments via local or international Visa and MasterCard to avail various e-commerce services. Online payment has not been a very convenient thing in Bangladesh until now. However, this time it was pretty sweet. Starting from buying railway tickets to airplane tickets to paying internet bills to topping up phone balance to buying cloths and apparels and books to grocery shopping to jewelries etc. it showcased a LOT of our local merchants. And among the list of many merchants, there was www.mydomainic.com. 

The name itself was enough to tell that they would provide domain and web hosting services. All these years I have been blogging on syedrakibalhasan.blogspot.com and I have been using a screenname of syedrakib everywhere else. Hence, I thought let's give it a shot.